Nvidia rally overnight lifts chip-related stocks in Asia on AI optimism

Asia's semiconductor and associated stocks rose on Wednesday after chipmaker Nvidia became the world's most valuable company, riding the AI boom.

Nvidia climbed 3.6% on Tuesday, lifting the company's market cap to $3.34 trillion, surpassing Microsoft, which is now valued at $3.32 trillion.

Earlier this month, Nvidia hit $3 trillion for the first time, soaring past Apple. Nvidia shares are up nearly 174% so far this year.

Contract chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp gained as much as 4.34% as the upbeat investor sentiment over Nvidia spilled over to tech stocks in Asia.

TSMC manufactures Nvidia's high-performance graphics processing units that help power large language models — machine learning programs that can recognize and generate texts.

Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry — known internationally as Foxconn — gained as much as 4.78%. It has a strategic partnership with Nvidia to build "AI factories," which will use Nvidia's chips in a whole range of applications, including electric vehicles and LLMs.

Japanese tech stocks also gained, including semiconductor testing equipment supplier Advantest, which counts Nvidia among its clients, according to Bloomberg data.

The stock saw a gain of as much as 3.86% on Wednesday, despite Bloomberg reporting that Nvidia accounts less for 1% of Advantest's total sales.

Japanese investment holding company Softbank Group Corp, which owns a stake in chip designer Arm, whose architecture is used in Nvidia chips, saw shares climb as much as 4.19%.

Nvidia's value chain also extends to South Korea, namely, memory chip maker SK Hynix and conglomerate Samsung Electronics.

Samsung shares climbed as much as 3.38%, while SK Hynix gained as much as 7.04%.

SK Hynix provides high